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Packing for Mars: The curious science of life in the void by Mary Roach explores the many eccentric challenges of putting humans into space

EARLY on in the space race, when the US was lagging behind the Soviet Union, D. L. Worf, a scientist with the aerospace company Martin Marietta, recommended that the windows of the lunar landing module be coated with transparent sugar. The crew could then eat their way through it on the way back to Earth, lightening the load of food they would need to carry on the way up.

Though, sadly, never put into practice, the concept of edible spacecraft typifies the unconventional thinking underlying the past half-century of space flight. As Mary Roach observes in Packing for Mars, manned space exploration 鈥渇orces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn鈥檛 acceptable. And possible.鈥�

Like sugar-coated landing modules, Roach鈥檚 account of space flight isn鈥檛 exactly orthodox. 鈥淲hat drew me to the topic of space exploration was not the heroics and adventure stories, but the very human and sometimes absurd struggles behind them,鈥� she writes. So instead of 鈥渙ne small step for man鈥� you will find an account of 鈥淲here No Flag Has Gone Before鈥�, an 11-page report by the North American Vexillological Association on how to plant the Stars and Stripes on the moon.

An accomplished journalist with boundless curiosity, Roach complements her historical research with an equally eccentric investigation of space travel today. She visits the Flight Analogs Research Center at the University of Texas, Galveston, where 鈥渢erranauts鈥� are paid $17,000 to stay in bed for three months in a bid to simulate the effect of zero gravity on bone structure. And she watches as the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency selects astronauts at Tsukuba Science City, near Tokyo. Here she sees 10 wannabes being confined to a simulated space station for a week, performing tasks such as folding 1000 paper cranes and stringing them on a thread in the traditional Japanese style. 鈥淔orensic origami鈥� Roach calls it, delighting in the cleverness of a test that 鈥渃reates a chronological record of each candidate鈥檚 work鈥�.

For all its amusement value, the origami test has a serious purpose: it measures the candidates鈥� ability to perform repetitive tasks accurately. Likewise, as funny as Roach can be, she brings serious insight to her subject in Packing for Mars, just as she successfully did in her previous books on the science of sex (Bonk) and the afterlife (Spook).

Her accounts of one peculiar experiment after another get a bit repetitive, but not her focus on human ungainliness, the departure point for her consideration of why we bother sending people into space and whether we should do so in the future. 鈥淭o a rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with,鈥� she observes. 鈥淭o me, the human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavour so endlessly intriguing. Everything one takes for granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed.鈥�

鈥淭o a rocket scientist, humans are the most irritating piece of machinery to deal with鈥�

The supreme effort that goes into human aeronautics has resulted in terrestrial technologies ranging from insulin pumps to sports bras, and even suggested ways of using our planet鈥檚 limited resources more sustainably 鈥� urine recycling, anyone? Roach is appreciative of all this, so much so that she drank her own purified urine in the spirit of research.

Yet her deeper point is that, by asking 鈥渉ow much normalcy can people forego?鈥�- whether by sending them to the moon or confining them to bed for three months- the world of space flight provides 鈥渁n exploration of what it means to be human鈥�. Underlying the headline glory of going to the moon, Mars and beyond is the vantage point space provides, from which to look back at that strange life form here on Earth.